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June 22, 2006I Opened the Gate, Laughingis Masumi Odi’s charming bookOF PRINTS AND WATERCOLORSillustrating the story of her spiritual quest after a divorce (from Japan scholar John Nathan—why did he never translate Kyoko’s House?). At the end, she opens all the gates on her garden fence, letting the deer and forest in, and welcoming the world as her garden. Then she takes the fence down, as there is no longer a need to live within barriers of her own making. Her last words are “I hope I keep my gate open always.” OPEN OR SHUT?People erect fences and gates to protect themselves from perceived harm, or to mark their territory. Gates keep things out, but they also let things in. What about you? Are your gates open or closed? THE ANSWER, MY FRIENDGates are a powerful physical metaphor for transition and growth. Walking through or under a gate reinforces one’s sense of progression and change, of passage from one state to another. How thrilling, then, it was to see 7,500+ of them curving through 23 miles of Central Park, which I did on February 27th of last year, the last day of Jean-Claude’s and Christo’s Central Park installation “The Gates.” While conducting my spring cleaning, which should be completed by next spring, I came upon the little square of orange fabric volunteers gave away as souvenirs. The Gates had called to me to come see them. I kept hearing about people who were going; it seemed like everyone was. So, never having seen a Christo installation, I decided I didn’t want to have to say I wish I’d seen it, quickly got a coworker to cover me, and hopped on a plane for a wild-hair long weekend in New York. Two friends and I walked for four hours under an undulating canopy of bright waving flags that spurred us to keep going, like a crowd of children running alongside us egging us on. The gates were power conductors. The energy in the air was palpable, literally blowin’ in the wind. JOY TO THE WORLDNot every New Yorker liked or approved of the gates, but I think those people’s personal gates are closed. What this was, as Anna Quindlen put it in Newsweek, was an ode to joy, in bright orange. It was a happening in Central Park. The world congregated for a celebration and affirmation that New York has indeed risen from the ashes of 9/11 and been reborn. The soul of New York sighed and said “Thanks, I needed that.” Anything that attracts a cross-section of the globe to congregate for the common goal of experiencing something together is a visionary achievement.
EVERYTHING. NO WAIT. NOTHING.I’d always thought, either Everything Matters or Nothing Matters (what movie is this a line from? “’Everything!’ ‘Nothing!’ ‘Everything!’ ‘Nothing!’”) and you’ve got to choose which camp you’re going to live in. Of course it’s more like that glass we keep hearing about, the half empty, half full one. Speaking very broadly here, people are on the side of life (everything), or the side of death (nothing). With both forces inherent in us all, the scale still tips to one side or the other. We affirm, or deny. We create, or destroy. We build, or tear down. We grow, or stagnate. Creation sucks power from destruction, and it’s the fate of our planet that hangs in the balance. On the side of death is the entire Bush administration. They’re the world breakers. They’re not interested in building anything but their own empire. MAKE ME, BREAK MEOn the side of life are the world makers: thinkers, doers, inventors, problem-solvers, like Buckminster Fuller, Louis Pasteur, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc., who leave the world richer and better than they found it. They feed the hungry, devote their lives, write exposés, blow the whistle, get thrown in jail, question authority, dare to speak the truth, challenge us to not settle for less. There are the bringers of joy: artists, writers, dancers, musicians, composers, craftspeople, actors, and on. They delight us, make us think, teach us, challenge us, inspire us. Then there are the everyday living who like you and me, love to laugh, strive to do no harm, fight for causes, gather their friends, sing off-key but sing anyway, and take their shoes off to walk in wet grass. Arthur Rubenstein once said something like, life is not about what you don’t have, or a someone who doesn’t love you; life is in front of you, bite into it.The Gates were on the side of life. Let’s continue to live it. YOU HADDA BE THEREPeople can offer interpretations galore of the gates, but their intent and meaning lay in the experience of them. It was the interaction of the gates with their users that informed their significance. A representation is not the art. A picture of a gate or a hundred is not going to tell you what you would feel walking under thousands of them, the orange bright against the crystal blue sky and the white of snow, the pond partially frozen, with the best of friends, Jon and Oscarito, and hundreds of people discovering for themselves what they were doing there. “It is real physical space,” as Christo put it. “You need to spend time walking in the cold air - sunny day, rainy day, even snow. It is not necessary to talk.” Christo would not allow the gates to be sold individually but instead had them industrially recycled, because the project could be experienced only in its entirety as designed and executed. L – I –V – I – N – !The weekend lives brightly in my mind not just because it was literally colorful, but because the spontaneity of the trip and the oddness of suddenly finding myself in New York, situated me squarely in the present. I was, as Matthew McConaughey put it in “Dazed and Confused”: “L – I – V – I – N,” with a buzz on the whole time. EYE OF THE TIGERThe day before, my Brooklyn friend Jon (see you in August!) and I had driven to Philadelphia to hook up with my sister Cruella and her partner, Shitty Kitty from Dodge City (not her real name), aka Xena (not her real name), to see the Salvador Dalí exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, my childhood museum. My mind got blown. It was my first experience of his art, the art pieces themselves. No reproduction I’d ever seen prepared me for the reality of his achievement. I love standing up close in front of a painting because you are standing in essentially the same place the artist once stood. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, whoever and anybody, stood in front of the painting to paint it as you are now to admire or despise their work. Except Jackson Pollock. He stood over the painting. WELL SHUT MAH MOUTHOnce again, the facsimile is not the art. I bought the 607-page PMA/Rizzoli catalog of the exhibit, and it does not remotely convey the wonder of staring right into the texture of his paint strokes. I associated him mostly with the ideas in his painting and his wildly imaginative realizations of them, not with his remarkable ability as a draftsman and technician with paint. I stood for 10 minutes in front of the “’Geodesic’ Portrait of Gala,” with my mouth hanging stupidly open. While I’m looking at it it is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen—or perhaps there are others as beautiful, but not more so. It is luminescent, a painting where you would not be at all surprised to see Gala’s head turn around and become the face of an angel. The repro in the book is for shit; I might have hurried by it with a cursory glance. It’s a tender, affectionate ¾ view from the rear, of his wife wearing a geodesic-shaped hat and a jewel-like brocaded jacket falling off one shoulder—the same odd angle used in the picture of Scott Fitzgerald you see on Scribner’s book covers, as if you were standing behind him in an elevator.
(Wouldn’t Gavin Newsom make a, well, a great Gatsby? He certainly spends enough time around people whose voices sound like money. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a picture of him in Pink magazine channeling Fitzgerald in exactly that same pose. Well what do you know; here it is. http://www.pinkmag.com/spring2006/newsom.html. They’re only twins. Goddamn, that mayor man of ours is ravishing, I pause to reflect. Is he for real?) OK, SNAP OUT OF ITGala’s jacket itself was on display in a glass case, radiating the aura of a past time deeply lived. I felt as if were seeing the painting through LSD-enhanced eyes—but this means only that I was really seeing. If we really looked and really saw, we wouldn’t need mind-altering drugs. Our minds have already been altered, away from the natural and spiritual beauty of the world, corrupted and exploited by man. (What movie: “The most beautiful thing in the world is of course the world itself.”) It’s all right out there under our noses. Bite into it. BITE INTO ITAfter the exhibit the four of us had a $30 brunch at the museum café and kept the mimosas flowing. My friend Jon, a designer who did some of the graphics—banners and such—for the show, had gotten us VIP passes, which meant we got in for free ($28 a throw) and were ushered right past the mile-long line waiting to get in. They staggered the shifts of when you could arrive, and most blocks of time were sold out. WELL HELLOJon told us he’d wanted to mount a “Hello, Dali” campaign for the show (I’m not sure if he was kidding or not). His boss did not present the idea to the client. “Oh but it’s so richly multifaceted!” “First there’s ‘Hello, (to you) Dali,’ you know like in Hello, Dolly!” “Or it’s what he says when he answers the (lobster) phone: ‘Hello, Dali!’” “How ‘bout when Dali asks you how do you say ‘hola’ in English, you can say, ‘hello,’ Dali.” “But it’s pronounced Da-LEE not DOL-ley.” “OK, so when someone asks you, who’s this Salvadore guy? You say, ‘Hel-LO-oh? da-LI-ee,?! Hel-LO-oh!! da-LI-ee!!’” We were busting a gut. The waiter wanted to join our party and came over as often as he could to tell us his life story. He comped us the drinks and got the tip he was looking for. Jon wanted to see some funky Philly neighborhood, so we took him to Manayunk and my sis and -in-law went home. How pleasant to meet my 3000-miles-away sister for lunch. Thanks to Cruella and Zena for picking up the bill. GET A LOAD OF THOSE UDDERS!While we were in the neighborhood I thought I’d surprise my old boyfriend Tom and as luck would have it he was home. Tom uttered one of my all-time favorite lines, which I tell you at my own expense. I’d broken up with him, I don’t remember why, but a month or two later I decided I was going to bed this guy one more time. He was plainly surprised, and as I pushed him down on the bed and took my off my shirt he exclaimed, “Holy cow!” LOVE IS LOVELIEROnly once have I had two affairs with the same man. If Tom were around I might be tempted to date him again; he’s as attractive as he was when I was 20-something, all impressed that he was 30 years old, but he’s aways away and has a steady. We were talking around the kitchen table when she, Merle, came in, and scrutinized us with a puzzled and concerned expression on her face. It turns out they were going to a party and she was making a cake that for some reason was supposed to look like a hamburger. I guess she was worried that Tom would get distracted and they wouldn’t finish on time. The two vanilla outer layers and the inner chocolate layer did the job fairly well for the beef and the bun, but she was having trouble with toppings and condiments. NOW FOR THE RELISH…I can’t remember what the proxy tomatoes were made of but Merle exclaimed, “And look! I have these for onions!”—some kind of round vanilla cookie dough she started to cut into slices—except that there was peanut butter on the inside so the onions had brown centers and looked more like hard-boiled eggs. She had a roll of ice green gum—I’ve never seen gum in a roll before—that she was twisting into spirals to represent the lettuce, though I wouldn’t advise eating them with the cake. M and Ms also somehow figured into it. Were they the ketchup and mustard? It was a charming if weird scene we had stumbled onto, and I was glad Tom has a loving companion. ANNUAL MAKE-FUN-OF-THE-OSCARS EVENT, EAST COAST EDITIONWe drove back to Brooklyn and I had one more day for The Gates and watching the Oscars with Jon and Oscarito. I drank it up and noticed much later on that one gray sock had turned purple. I must have spilled wine on it at some point without noticing it. As the credits were rolling I was asking, “What won best picture? Did they do that yet?” Now I was on the plane going home and I kept hearing over and over again in my head: Hel-LO-oh, da-LI-ee. Ever wonder how other people on the plane occupy their minds on long flights? It would be too cool if we all had thought balloons. Mine would say Hel-LO-oh, da-LI-ee. That’d be trippy. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to tell me, I can see you thinking it.” I L A D O L L E HSo get this. I had found a picture in the Examiner or Chron of the newly reopened Dalt Hotel in SF as seen from behind its front window, T L A D in mirror reverse. It was similar to the font Jon had chosen for the show, so I castrated the T and drew in the accents and added a white reverse ! O L L E H and sent it to everyone’s email. Subject: Whenever I think of you, I have to say…..“Hel-LO-oh, da-LI-ee.” Unbelievably, both Jon and Cruella thought it was a real picture of a real window in town. I’d made a hasty, I thought obviously, doctored gag picture—that was to be part of the fun, but Jon flashed back, “That’s unbelievable! Where did you find that?!” Same from Cruella. I explained my edits and didn’t think it looked at all real. I said what’re the odds I would have run up against a window saying Hello Dali of all things on it only two days after we’d been laughing about it? Jon wrote back “You some clever girl!” I flipped him a cross-country fingersnap. REMEMBER FUN?Anna Quindlen said, “We’ve lost sight of rituals of happiness. Oh, we’ve become adept, even mechanical, at remembrance and regret.” Well I say, remember happiness. It’s all out there in front of you. GoodBYE-ii, Dal-i-ee…Namaste, and may your gates remain always open.
The author pauses to reflect, February 27, 2005, Central Park ------------------------------------------------------------ My door stands wide in welcome
Open Thy Gate Before It's Too Late copyright Alexandra Jones 2006 |
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